Samwise Makers' News
Sunday, September 20, 2026
Teaching A Robot Hand To Walk
Researchers at ETH Zurich built a robotic hand that walks using all twenty of its fingers as legs. The system pairs a commercial hand with a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a compact battery, then uses a neural network trained via sim-to-real reinforcement learning to navigate complex terrain. In testing, the hand crossed 14 surface types including gravel and grass, and succeeded in 21 of 25 fall-recovery trials, righting itself in under 20 seconds. Drifting right requires constant correction. The goal: a hand capable of autonomously detaching from a robotic arm to reach otherwise inaccessible targets.
Coreboot Hikes The Bay Trail To DRAM Initialization
Coreboot can now initialize DRAM on Intel Bay Trail SoCs without proprietary binary blobs, as Mate Kukri demonstrated at the Open Source Firmware Conference 2026. Kukri reverse-engineered the initialization sequence using the SerialICE debugger paired with the Unicorn Engine CPU emulator, developing an approach designed for general applicability beyond Bay Trail. These decade-old SoCs powered countless budget Chromebooks. Achieving a fully blob-free boot requires Libreboot, the strict FSF-endorsed fork. The OSFC talk will be archived on the conference website. It marks a meaningful advance toward fully auditable firmware on widely-available legacy hardware.
Laser Your Way Into Debug Mode On The RP2350
Ledger Donjon security researchers used laser fault injection to bypass secure boot and restore debug access on the RP2350 microcontroller. The team decapped the chip from the backside, used infrared light through the silicon wafer to locate the debug-enable register via photon-emission electron microscopy, then fired a laser at an adjacent area to flip the target bits. The technique extracted the 128-bit secret in the Raspberry Pi Foundation own RP2350 hacking challenge. The setup costs roughly $250,000 and represents the first documented ARMv8 TrustZone bypass on this chip, circumventing its active glitch-detection countermeasures.
A Hotspot Becomes A Handheld
Builder bkovac transformed a $20 AliExpress 4G mobile hotspot — an MF800 running a Snapdragon 410 (MSM8916) — into a pocketable Linux handheld. An iPhone USB keyboard case provides input, while an Adafruit Sharp SPI memory display replaces the original smaller screen. The build required PCB modifications on the modem board, a custom power board, and significant software work to enable display support under mainstream Linux. The project is documented at bkovac.github.io/modem-thing/. It demonstrates that capable Linux handhelds do not require purpose-built hardware — repurposing discarded mobile infrastructure can yield genuinely useful pocket computers.
Teardown And Repair Of An Insoma Water Timer
Electronupdate repaired an Insoma 3-outlet water timer that stopped working across all channels after just four months. A teardown revealed three 6VDC solenoids, a PCB potted in white epoxy, and only about 2V output where 6V is required for solenoid actuation. After carefully scraping away the epoxy potting compound, the culprit was clear: a swollen electrolytic capacitor in the power boost circuit. Replacing the capacitor restored full operation. The repair illustrates a common frustration with potted consumer electronics — what would normally be a five-minute capacitor swap required first excavating through layers of epoxy.
No GPU, No Problem: Flagship LLMs On A GPU-less Teenaged Server
MattMo demonstrates running GLM 5.3 Flash, Qwen 3.8 Flash, and Qwen 3.8 27B on a 14-year-old Dell PowerEdge R720 server with no GPU. The key is 348 GB of DDR3 system RAM — enough to hold even the largest flagship models in memory. Twin Xeon processors with 20 total threads produce roughly four tokens per second, slow but functional. The server costs around $600 on the second-hand market. The older Xeon processors lack certain modern instructions that could improve throughput. MattMo argues batch-processing workloads make practical sense at 4 tps for homelab operators who already own servers of this vintage.
JLC Puts AI-Assisted Board Design In Files You Can Read, Review, And Edit
JLCPCB unveiled AI-assisted PCB design tools at its fourth Spark conference, held September 19 at the Futian Convention Center in Shenzhen. The centerpiece is a new .eprj3 project format that stores circuit board data as human-readable, Git-diffable JSON and text files — unlike traditional opaque binary formats. AI design tools produce output that engineers can directly open, inspect, modify, and continue editing after the AI completes its turn. This collaborative workflow reduces friction in iterative prototyping and manufacturing cycles. The format openness also allows standard AI models to assist with component changes, potentially making professional PCB design more accessible.
Sources: Adafruit Blog
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
nLab all-in-one electronics lab — Kickstarter (Project We Love), $25k goal
Arduview transparent handheld console — Arduboy-based, early access at $49
Crowd Supply: active embedded hardware campaigns at crowdsupply.com
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
ESP32 Predatory Firmware — 6.8k stars, radio/NFC/IoT security toolkit
U8glib-2 graphics library — 6.7k stars, Arduino/LCD/embedded displays
Embedded Systems Engineer Roadmap — 13.2k stars, career/learning guide
Upcoming Events
Maker Faire Bay Area — Sep 25-27, San Mateo County Fairgrounds, CA
Open Source Firmware Conference (OSFC) — Sep 19-20, Berlin/Online
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency